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Trump Speaks Like a Thug Because He Wants to Rule Like One

The president’s violent language reveals his authoritarian urge to rule through intimidation.

President Donald Trump giving his State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on February 24, 2026.

In 2015, my editors at The Nation first set me the task of covering Donald Trump by asking me to write about his coarse, mobster-like use of the English language. In the years since, Trump-speak has continued to fascinate—and horrify—me.

On Wednesday, two weeks into the renewed hostilities between the United States and Iran, Trump announced on Fox News that “we’re going to beat the fucking shit out of them. We’ll be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating.” In the past, such a tirade would have at least been termed “unpresidential”; quite likely, it would have triggered calls for the president’s resignation. Of course, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and countless other senior political figures swore like sailors, but they did so in private, understanding that democratic political systems are sustained, in part, by the illusion of civility. Trump deliberately dispenses with that illusion. There’s a swagger to how he communicates that is intended to project a murderous, unstoppable intent. His speech is similar to how the erstwhile Filipino strongman leader Rodrigo Duterte talked of meting out violence to his enemies and to street criminals while in office, and to how Jair Bolsonaro addressed his supporters in Brazil.

In the Oval Office, on the same day that Trump pledged to beat the fucking shit out of the Iranians, the madman in chief told a gathering of journalists who were questioning him about Iran’s latest attacks on US military facilities in the region, “They’ve already apologized, but you know we gotta smack them a little bit.”

This isn’t the language of high-stakes foreign-policy decision-making; it is a crude, brutal way of talking that Trump thinks will convey toughness. It’s a simulacrum of the strong man, a fantasy woven in Trump’s brain to present an image of indomitability. It’s the language of the made........

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